10 Promising Content Management Systems

By Jacob Gube

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When it comes to content management systems (CMS) and publishing platforms, there are plenty to choose from. They vary in technologies used, organization structure, performance, and license. You’ve probably heard of popular content management systems such as Drupal, WordPress, Movable Type, Joomla!, and Textpattern, but if you want to try a platform that’s a little less main stream – check out these excellent alternatives.

In this article, you’ll find 10 terrific content management systems that may not garner as much attention as their more popular counterparts – but should.

There’s a large amount of content management systems out there, so if your favorite isn’t on here, share it with us in the comments.

ExpressionEngine is a powerful and easy-to-use content management system. ExpressionEngine is known for its flexibility and intuitive Template Engine that lets developers easily mold the CMS into its intended use. It has a built-in caching feature that significantly reduces server load (helpful in times of high traffic). Check out the Showcase section on EE’s website to see live sites that use ExpressionEngine.

Concrete5 is a solid content management system that’s a breeze to use. You can edit a web page live by entering "edit mode", which makes the regions and elements on the web page you are viewing editable. It has a very robust administration panel with a built-in system for gathering statistics so you don’t need to install a plugin/extension or use a third party application like Google Analytics to monitor your site traffic.

Radiant CMS focuses itself for use in small teams. It’s designed as a simple and elegant CMS akin to 37 Signals applications, holding out on complicated and unnecessary features to provide users a straightforward interface for creating and editing website content.

CushyCMS is a "plug-and-play" content management system that doesn’t require you to install anything to get it working, which can greatly reduce your maintenance cost and development time. With CushyCMS, you define which areas are editable, making it a safe option to your not-very-tech-savvy clients. CushyCMS is currently being used by about 10,000 websites and is gaining popularity as a no-hassle, user-friendly CMS.

Symphony, created by Overture, is a CMS designed for developers, utilizing XSLT to provide developers flexibility in customizing Symphony. If you don’t know much about XSLT, Overture provides a large number of tutorials and screencasts on their resource center. With that said, Symphony isn’t for everybody and those looking for a content management system that requires little technical expertise should probably consider another option.

MODx is both a content management system and a PHP web application framework. MODx puts a high emphasize on web standards, allowing you to build XHTML 1.1 strict compliant websites easily. It comes with a build-in CSS menu builder for hassle-free site navigation development. For less-experienced users, MODx comes with a graphical user interface installer so you can get up and running quickly.

Plone CMS is a feature-packed content management system built on the Zope web application framework. It’s supported by a large and active developer community so you won’t have any trouble finding help. Plone has extensive documentation in a wiki format to help you get started and help you take advantage of its more advanced features.

Railfrog is one of the few CMS’s built on top of the Ruby On Rails web application framework (the same technology powering popular web applications such as Twitter and Basecamp). To help you get started on Railfrog, check out its Developer Portal where you’ll find guides that you can follow to get rolling.

TYPO3 is an open-source, enterprise-level content management system focused on providing companies a solution for websites and their intranet. While many CMS’s try to be simple and basic, TYPO3 provides users complex and powerful features to help you achieve complicated tasks and ability to integrate with other applications.

SilverStripe is a PHP-based, open-source content management system. It uses the MVC coding framework to offer developers great flexibility and potential for scalability. Check out the live demo on their site to see a basic installation of SilverStripe as well as to take a peak at how the administration system looks like.

I haven’t had the chance to test any big amounts of CMSs, what would be a good and easy choice for a starter. Since Rails could be interesting to get into, Radiant looks like a worthy choice… Any other opinions?

@Karl: That’s a seemingly simple question with a potentially complex answer. In short, it really depends on what you’re trying to do, what you have in terms of server technologies, what scripting languages you already know (so that you can leverage that skill), and who will use the content management system. For example, if you want to run a blog and you already know PHP – I would look at WordPress. If you wanted to run a RoR-based application (because you already know RoR or you’re seriously wanting to learn), I’d check out Railsfrog. If you’re building a CMS for a client that isn’t “tech-savvy” and is barely able to write an email, I would go with a CMS that has a user-friendly rich text editor like Concrete5, or CushyCMS if you don’t want to maintain their application (i.e. upgrading, troubleshooting, reinstalling), but I wouldn’t recommend Drupal (I’ve had numerous complaints about the administration panel’s complexity with Drupal-powered sites I’ve deployed or been a part of). Everything has its ups and downs, pro’s and con’s – in the end, you pick one that suits your needs the best. There’s a ton of options, you’re not limited to WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla (although these are great CMS’s and I personally love working with the first two). Check out The CMS Matrix to compare between different CMS’s.

@Stu Smith: I’m not opposed to helping application developers seek beta testers and plug their up and coming apps in the comments – as long as it’s appropriate to the subject and not spammy. If anyone’s interested in helping out Stu for EasyAs123Web, check out the site he linked to.

@styletime: Yeah, please keep us posted on the WordPress -> ExpressionEngine migration. I’m going to play around with the free, personal license just to see how smoothly it goes. I’ve heard a lot of positive things about EE.

Dreamscape CMS, I have been using it for years, since it was called Expanse CMS, Nate who is now working for Liferay developed it. The new now Open source development can be found at http://dreamscapecms.com/

We built it from the bottom up to be a great framework for developers to dream up any idea with, but still deliver simple to edit sites to the end owners who have to deal with them for years. It’s also completely free and open source, which some of the others listed here are not. There’s some screencasts and a demo at http://concrete5.org

I would have to also vote for cms made simple. It is ridiculously easy to implement, all you really need to know is html/css since it uses very simply smarty tags to display content. Perfect for small-mid size site management.

I love http://CMSMadeSimple.org because it is flexible, scalable, and solid. Working with Smarty php is easy. The only thing that is lacking is participation in their user forums. The developers hang out on the CMS IRC channel, but many CMSMS users would rather use the forum.

The thing about the complexity of Drupal – you can hide that from the people who use / administer your site, if you know what you’re doing when you set it up. There is absolutely no reason to give your authors a way to mess with modules, themes, etc. Set everything up for them in advance, giving people only menu items that they can handle. You can do this with Drupal’s permission system.

Great things about Drupal:

1) Theming – take a look at http://www.splendora.com … does it even look like a CMS based site? didn’t think so ;-) You can customize just about every single piece of HTML that comes out of Drupal core or third party modules that you install. Speaking of themes, the built in theme “Garland” is so good that WordPress STOLE it.

4) A KILLER API. I know it only matters to programmers. But since I am one, this is nice. Thinking about writing sites in raw PHP again gives me the willies, the support from Drupal makes that so painful.

You know, it still amazes me that the general community has not caught on to the CMS that I have been exclusively using since February of 2007 – TYPOlight. This system (depsite its unfortunate similarity to the TYPO3 namesake) is the LGPL near-twin to Expression Engine and actually is BETTER than EE in many ways. I have made a living developing for TYPOlight. The United States CMS market has been completely oblivious to it and still seems to be, but I can unequivocally say it is awesome on so many levels, and its MVC PHP5 Framework is a dream to develop with.

Every single person I have let know about it and has decided to use it has not looked back, and that is not an exaggeration.

I can testify that MODx is fantastic! The web company who built my site used it and its the interface I use to manage the content, add pages images and even files with like no knowledge of webby stuff. If you want to have a look at a site runnin on MODx click my name i think its linked to my site. Really love it and it kicks the pants of WordPress for versatility!

CMS Made Simple is not even close to acceptable as a viable CMS. The code is a mess, there is no framework to it and I’ve spent hours doing what should take minutes because the code is trash. Sorry, that’s my experience with it.

Telligent, the makers of Community Server, are behind it. Works great for a single blog or a large content site. It’s written using ASP.NET, and works with a variety of databases – MySQL, Vista DB, SQL Server, etc.

WP and EE for me – should be all you ever really need. I have paid a little attention to Silverstripe but haven’t had the chance to actually implement it yet, I may try it.

The best thing about WordPress and Expression Engine is the community behind them. HUGE – so much support and plugins and hacks and help if you need to write your own hack/plugin. Not sure any of these other CMS’s have that behind them.

Radiant looks cool but not a big fan of textile and I’m not a ruby developer so more advanced hacking may not be available to me. Does look really nice tho.

Cushy is pretty cool in that you just add a class to what you want editable and the 3rd party site picks it up to edit for your client. Been a little reluctant to use that because if Cushy site goes down then you/your client is down for editing and it just becomes a static site. It would be awesome for Cushy to open source that and web devs could run their own little cushy on their site for their clients.

I recommend adding http://www.graffiticms.com to this list. One of the few ASP.NET-based CMSs with many options for the back-end database (MySQL, MSSQL, Access or VistaDB). It offers the simplicity of WordPress with options to make it less “bloggy”. A good alternative to DotNetNuke for simpler sites. Oh, and it’s free for non-commercial use (just $99 otherwise).

WebGUI (http://www.webgui.org) is a quite popular system in use on over 10,000 sites. It’s free, and hundreds of huge organizations use it like California State University, Hawaii Department of Education, Volvo, Brunswick Bowling, and the United States Department of State.

Please include DotNetNuke (www.dotnetnuke.com). It’s free, has thousands of very low cost modules and is business ready.

I find most of your suggestions to be great for personal or light business uses. However, we have a website with over 100 pages of content as well as many of the available modules which simply are not available on the other cms’s.

Some of the favorites I’ve highlighted on my CMS Jam blog (that are designed for ease of use) include zimplit, snippetmaster, and cms made simple, but ripe website manager might be a favorite once it comes out of beta too.

There’s one with a name similar as the one foobarph recommended (CMS Made Simple http://cmsmadesimple.org) and it is very simple indeed. It saves the contents of the website in a single file and uses tags to define the pages. CMSimple http://www.cmsimple.com/

Railfrog has great ideas but it seems nobody is developing it. I have not seen even demo site and I have been looking the project closely for couple of years. Typo3 (IMHO) is a mess. ModX is indeed is a different and quite intresting, also expression engine and Radiant are promising. The rest on the CMS’s on your list I have not tried but I will take a look. Thanks for the intresting post!

another vote for cms made simple. This cms really lives up to it’s name, i find it similar to expression engine and it is free. My other vote goes to expression engine as it a powerful cms, however it’s not free. Another cms I’ve tried is joomla but this one doesnt get my vote because it is not easy to use.

Think corecms.co.nz is one of the best out there in terms of the power and functionality it has as a complete business solution for a company, with great e-commerce abilities and is always updated. You have to pay and pay for it yearly but what you get out of it as a company is intense.

Jason, Is there a reason why you left Joomla! off the list? Joomla may be the big boy on the OS block, so maybe it’s easy to skip over in favor of the lesser-knowns, which you’ve outlined quite well (kudos), but leaving Joomla off the hotlist is like leaving strawberry ice cream off the list of favorite desserts.

I tried joomla & typo3, but it’s really not for me, as these framework are designed for more sophisticated websites, it always require so much configuration that I end up with a really massive CMS, with thousands of useless files and features. (plus the user interface of typo3 is the uglyest I ever seen, just feels like windows 95 to me..)

as a rails developper, it’s just faster and simpler to build from scratch.

TYPO3 is by far the most used Open Source CMS in the world with more than 1.000.000 implementations worldwide. Yes it does have a major focus in countries surrounding Germany but nevertheless its the only true enterprise Open Source CMS with all the feature completeness you need. It is used by large enterprises allover the world, something that none of the other other Open Source CMSes abpart from EZ Publish and Open CMS have ever managed. TYPO3 is getting a bit old but thats why the new 5.0 branch has been started more than a year ago and the Flow 3.0 framework it will be based on is one of the most powerful PHP Frameworks in the world.

Is is just me? I really don’t consider anything built on ASP to be a viable CMS solution. PHP, Ruby, Python… these languages will run on any box known to man. With ASP, I’m forever tied to a Windows hosting server. And, ewww.

It’s probably the most flexible CMS I have ever worked with, and I came from Textpattern (2+ years) which is already pretty flexible which should speak to txp users !

Now I have to agree with Fred about typolight : it’s not very well known outside of germany but it has all the qualities to become the next Drupal : it has built-in multi-lingual, multi-site capabilities and versionning. On top of that, it’s the only CMS I know aside from modx, EE and eZpublish to handle custom content types out of the box (Drupal needs the CCK module) and does not force you into a content pattern.

It’s an underdog, alright, but it’s one of the few CMS with a fully accessible admin (works 100% without JS), it’s built for PHP5 from the start, coded in OO (check out the code you’ll see quality is there) and has some unique modules like formauto and catalog.

The only thing typolight is missing is marketing… with it, a wider international user base and boom it could become a BIG player.

I’m a big fan of cushy. I use it any place I know my client is going to want to add some text, so instead of placeholding with “text goes here” I just add a cushy div. They haven’t been adding very many features though…project seems a bit stale. Haven’t had any issues with the service being down, but if they aren’t able to get enough people to subscribe to the pro service then the company could be in trouble…they probably aren’t used too heavily so maybe there’s not too much cost associated with the site.

It’s the only service I know of that offers the service they way they do. I agree, an open source route makes sense for them. BTW, there is a potential issue if you have trust issues with a client of yours. There is the ability to insert PHP via the editor. Just be aware of that.

By now, everybody should know that PivotX is absolutely the most promising there is. It’s still in Beta, but already very solid, and will probably get a Release Candidate version soon. Go check it out at http://www.pivotx.net, absolutely recommended for people with a blog, and you can use it as a CMS as well…

@Yuka: Are you kidding? Have you ever tried customizing SharePoint beyond the web interface? It is the most awful thing to work with for a programmer.

I think even a free open source blog CMS such as WordPress can do a better job than SharePoint serving a website (of course I am not talking about the SharePoint file management which does not exist in any of the mentioned CMS-es).

First off, Drupal? No thanks. If you notice, most of the systems displayed here are elegant, simple and sturdy on one level or another. Drupal is monolithic in everything it tries to do.

If you’re on Rails, RadiantCMS is by far the best way to go. I also give mad props to EE for the PHP guys out there. If you’re not aware, there is a PHP equivalent of RadiantCMS called FrogCMS at http://madebyfrog.com.

eZpublish – I have been using it for pushing 5 years now, but it is amazingly easy to mold into doing absolutely anything. A framework with a lot editable without getting your hands too dirty in the code.

MadeByFrog is just like RadiantCMS but for PHP, so more people can use it. It is also a lightweight PHP framwork and I think is the most promising CMS around at the moment.

Drupal and WordPress – I imagine the only reason you left these off was that they are already popular and aren’t ‘promising’ as such. Great, extendable CMSes with a amazing communities though.

Also, ModX is a fork of Etomite, and that has come leaps and bounds recently too. They are similar, but Etomite is a bit more simple to use, whilst ModX has more bells and whistles.

Perhaps Mambo should also have been mentioned. Although its now 8 years old and has had over 8 million downloads (almost 1.5 million in the last year alone), since Joomla forked a lot of people have either assumed Mambo is dead, or that Mambo and Joomla are so similar that its not worth bothering to check Mambo out. Wrong! The days of bloated code have long gone and Mambo is a very different CMS to Joomla. These days, its probably fair to say Mambo is a little less “in your face” but definitely promising!

All these CMS are for the novice users and none of the really good CMS are mentioned. Drupal and Django are worth mentioning but these CMS are not for your average joe so people think, to many people promote CMS that hold your hand, which is fine with me as long as the good CMS gain tweakers at heart. any CMS that’s open-sources has my vote no matter how easy it is to us, but come on mention the technical CMS also as those are more than just promising CMS.

Well it all depends on what you want the CMS for. If it’s a powerful portal, I would choos PHP-Fusion 7. It’s incredibly pewrful, and it seems that everybody forgot about it. But now its back and its at its best.

For a blog I wanted WP, but my layout specification is too rough for WP. So i wrote down one myself :D.

try taking a peak at http://www.myspotnote.com. Not really CMS per se, but an easy way to let non-tech users edit text/images on an existing HTML page. Best part is, you don’t even need to re-build the page, and if you want to, you can limit them to what they can do.

I want to start an online business in 2009 and am looking around at how to get there. Your list and the remarks it generated are very useful. You seem to be a nice community of people who make insightful comments. Good luck to you all.

@Yuka: Sharepoint is not a “most promising CMS”. Out of the box, Sharepoint has limited functionality. Some very basic intranet-type uses with a bit of DMS bolted on. If you’re a MS volume/enterprise customer, your users are already licensed to as Sharepoint clients. But to license the organisation properly, here’s a little costing exercise for a business of 300 users: $1.1million. That includes things like MS Windows Server, SQL Server, Sharepoint server, etc etc…MS really know how to leech money from your org and keep leeching. From a skills POV, SHarepoint is not much use to a small team of developers, so get ready to open your org’s purse-strings for 3rd party developers, not forgetting those ubiquitous consultancy fees. Vote of no confidence from me.

@Hyper: I’d have to agree with Hyper on that one. Sharepoint is very unwieldy, and if you’re a person who cares about not just how a a web page looks, but also how the source code looks like – Sharepoint’s mark up is horrendous.

Gotta go with Expression Engine. I tested at least 50 systems and it was the only one that truly let me do whatever I wanted to do (design and code wise) with no boundaries. Modx was close but was a little harder to learn and their blogging/newslister extension was poorly documented.

You can set up as many custom fields and field groups as you want for any kind of information you want to publish. And (and this was key for me) you can avoid the wysiwyg editing “features” from plug-ins like tinymce. Don’t want your client to make everything bold, centered and purple? Me neither. So, you preplan what sections of pages should be styled in what way (like a good designer should) and you make those into custom fields in the manager. They just fill in the text and the styling is handled behind the scenes. Of course, if you want to allow them to bold, italicize, etc., you can.

EE was the only application where I felt like I could truly build a custom application tailored to my clients rather that working around the restrictions of the CMS. And I’m not a coding genius either. I know html and css and that’s it. If you know php, you can take it even further.

I started as a graphic designer. I built websites years ago with FrontPage and Dreamweaver and without knowing much code I ended up working with WordPress. I wanted to customize the already made themes, and slowly picked up CSS… and then a little php… then eventually I’ve picked up enough to build my own custom themes/templates from scratch. They have a great community and great documentation.

I’ve used Expression Engine on about 6 projects and absolutely think its the best out there. During each project I learn more about what this system is capable of handling. Yes, the full version does cost money… but hey you get what you pay for. Plus if its for a client, just bake it into the cost.

I agree with Ronin above. I have tried all of the major CMS’s as well as many of the lessor known ones and OCportal beets them all hands down.

It has always been far superior than the rest in my mind but the reason most have probably not heard of it is because it has only recently gone Open Source. The customer support can’t be touched, the developers are always quick to help or point you in the right direction. The program is also one of the most well documented CMS’s that I have ever seen.

To learn more go to http://ocportal.com/site/features.htm and have a look at the many features. You will scroll for quite a while checking them out. Please note that beneath each of the major feature areas there is a See More link, click then to see even more features. I would defy anyone to show me another CMS that has even 50% of the features of OCportal. Please note that you are not forced to use or install them all, you can turn off anything that you do not want to use.

It’s a hosted-only solution, so there’s nothing to install or maintain. All the HTML is generated by the CMS, so you simply take your design and implement it using CSS. There’s nothing more to know than that really. Plus, it even has a built-in (though basic) CSS editor which is pretty convenient.

It would be nice if there was better documentation for designers/developers just to get familiar with the system, but there are example files to look at which takes care of most of this. Plus, it’s not the best solution for developers looking for infinite extensibility of functionality through plug-ins, etc., but it makes the process of delivering a really nice-looking site built in CSS super fast. It also gives the end client some very slick tools for managing all kinds of content, and it includes a nice integrated blog. The UI is very refined, but is not complicated or overwhelming for novice users.

One of the things I like best about Rocketship is that you don’t have to spend hours of time training the client how to use it! And you won’t get phone calls after you deliver their site asking how to do various things. It pretty much eliminates all customer support issues that you tend to get with most all other CMS solutions I’ve seen, such as WordPress, etc.

Overall, Rocketship is a very nice integrated package that works well, is ideal for designers who know CSS, and delivers a great web solution for those not-so-tech-savvy clients.

Try it out, and let me know what you think about it. How does it compare to the 10 CMS solutions Jacob listed here?

WOOOWWW !!! Thanks for this great article that triggers useful comments ! It’s interesting to see that CMS are today adopted by thousands of end users who do not have coding background. When a few years ago CMS were often tools develop by web agencies to quickly implement websites for enterprises, today CMS are used by thousands of end users. In this revolution WordPress will remain as a significant step. True that after years of development the majority of CMS have much more intuitive interfaces to manipulate content but when it’s a question of creating templates, it is still “hands in the dirt”. Nowadays, users should be able to easily build their own template just by dragging and dropping elements on the fly. I mean your page has a sidebar on the left and u want it on the right, just pull it there and it will stay there. You have a category on your topbar, you want it in your left navigation bar, just pull it and drop it there. You want to reorganize the order of your menu, same thing, push elements like you reorganize your bookmarks in your browser. Same thing for images inside articles too. Yes I know this is some work to implement but with techniques like Ajax it should be possible and the first ones offering these options will definitely have great arguments to increase their market share ;)

Following my previous comment : By ‘Googling’ the whole morning, I finally found one CMS that has amazing wysiwyg drag and drop functions I was thinking about. It’s called CMSBOX (http://www.cmsbox.com) and it looks awesome but unfortunately they only sell it in Switzerland (?). Does anyone know a similar CMS or do I need to move to Switzerland ?

Which of these, if any, would work for a college-wide CMS? I have $0 to spend, but need a CMS for our college’s site. Which of these is robust enough to handle a large site? (I’ve looked at Drupal. Need something I could roll out in less than 18 months!!)

@Tusculum College: uPortal might also fit the bill for you. Obviously it is more of a portal so it might be better suited for internal use. It was in use at my university and was flexibile enough to incorporate all our disparate IT and web services. Probably through lots of customizations and hacks, but it worked.

I think it’s great how over half the comments on here are “Why not give [insert unknown beta CMS here] a try?” or “Try xxx, it’s the best hands down.” It’s obvious that no CMS is the best hands down for every situation.

Thanks for including Symphony, I’d never heard of this one before and have always been curious about XSLT.

Happy New Year & greetings all the way from East Africa via Canada. Since I came down in these parts for a ONE WEEK business trip in Nov 2005, I got into blogging via Blogger to highlight my “Africa experiences” but I quickly moved over to WordPress after it reached the evolutionary version 2.7 release. Suffice to say, I’ve been parroting WP down here like crazy and have done quite a few sites using it. My biggest use of WP so far on the web is the Charlie Claw’s/Wasini Island company based on the Indian Ocean coast of Shimoni (about a 90 minute drive from Mombasa, Kenya) that offers day tours for dhow sailing, scuba diving, dolphin spotting, snorkeling, etc. Take a peek here: http://wasini.com.

But it’s 2010 and I’m looking to explore other CMSs that are not necessarily blog oriented from the start. So, after reading this most EXCELLENT article, I’ll be taking Concrete5, Typolight (not TYPO3!!), FrogCMS, and some others for a spin on my sexy Linux Mint 8 (based on Ubuntu 9.10 which has Debian roots) laptop, which I’m LOVING after permanently ditching Windoze around November ’09. Talk about LIFE CHANGING EXPERIENCES — no viruses, worms, trojans, excellent hardware detection of my Huawei 3G USB modems, my Nokia celly, printers & other devices that I’d have to get Windows drivers for, etc.

Anyhow, I just wanted to THANK all the coders in the open source movement who really step up to the plate and bring us these great CMS products listed above. Ditto for the peeps behind Linux (and various distros like Linux Mint, MEPIS, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, etc.), BSD nix, GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice, frameworks (like JQuery, CodeIgniter, KohanaPHP, Django, RoR, ModX and tons more), and a plethora of projects too numerous to mention. U guys TRULY rock & deserve a Nobel Prize award instead of these frigging bureaucrat jokers who do jack squat.

In the grand scheme of things, where would the world be without open source IT professionals pushing the envelope and developing some truly useful apps for the masses? Just look at the hundreds of thousands of small to large-scale websites that are on the Net thanks to FREE apps like WordPress (or Drupal, Plone, Zope, Joomla, Mambo, etc.), MySQL and languages like PHP, PERL, Ruby, Python, etc. as well as with the HELP of these other CMSs listed in this insightful discussion. BTW, nice WordPress blog you got here Jacob…I love the theme!! See folks…WordPress rocks!! :-)

Cheers!

– Max (aka Max “The IT pro”)

PS–> I also downloaded Serendipty (aka S9Y) after seeing CMSMatrix (or some similarly named site) using it in an IMPRESSIVE manner. http://www.s9y.org ============

QUESTIONS for CMS Developers: 1 a) Which CMSs allows one to easily implement a rotating header images?? I’m able to do this using the WordPress K2 theme with images of 780 X 200px. Who else does it? Very important!

b) Which CMS has a built in facility for rendering the site to Mobile devices (cell phones, PDAs, etc.)?? This is VERY IMPORTANT because most people in Africa are accessing the Net via EDGE/3G cellies!!

2) I use lots of pics in my sites. Which CMSs has a built in gallery that does slide shows and kool Lightbox effects, etc….in an intuitive manner without having to install a damn plugin?? 3) Which CMSs allows me to create forms that can be emailed to me after submission or populates a database? 4) Which CMSs have social bookmarking features built in so that I don’t have to install the AddtoAny plugin or something similar for my posts and pages? 5) Which CMSs allows me to do an excerpt (read more) post with an image in an nice, easy manner??

Thanks for this great post. You have covered some of the top CMS solutions.

My name is Aaron and I am part of the team at Preation in Durham, North Carolina. We have built a new website content management and marketing system for small businesses called Eden. Eden allows anyone to update their website and optimize it for the search engines on their own. We believe that this solution is very important to small businesses because most of them cannot afford search engine optimization services from traditional consultants.

I would like to request that you write a review about Eden. I believe that your readers would be interested in Eden’s unique do-it-yourself search engine optimization features as well as the large number of easy website management features including: free professionally designed templates, real on-page editing, drag-and-drop page tree, photo galleries, forms, testimonials, slideshows, video, multi-tier navigation, calendars, and event registration. Full details about Eden’s features are available in the product tour on our website (http://www.preation.com/content/build/4756).

Came across one many years ago, developed in Germany, webEdition (http://www.webedition.de/en/), that has since gone open source last year. Seems pretty big in Germany, and looks to be quite flexible. There is English documentation. Anyone has experiences with that?

Another vote for cmsmadesimple – I think its a fantastic cms – loads of features. The only thing is it can be complicated to use – when Ive used wordpress thats alot more user friendly, but then its alot less maluable than cmsmadesimple.

Indigloo online website builder combines the power of drupal and joomla with browser based website creation.It helps you to create a complex website of unlimited pages.Its good for people who want to earn moneyfrom google adsense as basic website is free and it dont ask for sharing of adsense income.

Expression Engine & SilverStripe are both excellent Content Management Systems. SilverStripe especially lightweight and easy to use whilst EE has extreme flexibility. I think WordPress, Joomla lead the popularity stakes purely because of all the plugins and themes available!

what about GetSimple Cms its really simple and easy to deploy xml base cms no database such as mysql is required, PHP base CMS easy for designer and for small websites, it has lots of plugin to make life easy check out http://get-simple.info/, i hope everybody will like it.

CMS-Logic is a loaded Content Management System that comes with all the bells and whistles and the flexibility that enables the average person the controls needed to manage their own site. Not only is it a solid platform, but with our Store-Logic app, you can control your site content and manage your online store all in one. Did I mention the powerful Search Engine Optimization tools that comes standard with every Content Management System? To find out more give us a look.

CMS Made Simple (CMSMS) should definitely be in your list. I’ve worked with about half of those you have listed and none come close to CMSMS for ease of use for the client or end user. Also very robust now and have an ever increasing list of good modules. It’s a breeze to setup and easy to modify via Smarty templates. I don’t use anything else (other than WordPress on rare occasions) for constructing CMS based websites.

But what of feature-rich, multi-user environments? Any of these solutions is indeed great for a web-based brochure, or blog – a one-man or one-company operation. But what about user registration and collaboration (forums, etc)?

A particular pet peeve of mine is that, to date, there is not a single CMS for serious writers, especially those who publish considerable literary works such as novels. None of these, at least from my inspection, offer a ready-to-go platform for, say, collaborative fiction, multi-writer environments – where you have series, stories, chapters, comments, etc. And please don’t tell me about linking articles – anyone who seriously writes knows it is not the same.

None of the old “standards” (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla) have this, and I don’t feel like wrestling something to make it do what it really wasn’t designed to. If any of these “promising” frameworks can fit the bill, please point me to it – because thus far, no cookie!

I go with @Hyper’s comment regarding SharePoint. I worked with several small and big teams of developers and all of them hated SharePoint. Besides a limited functionality, it’s clumsy, slow, complicated and… some 100 other reasons. (It’s so nineties…))

I was a little surprised when I read this (excellent) article that nobody seems to care about performance. What if 30 developers access your CMS all day long, adding content, bringing up new subsites, additional forums, new blogs? A CMS seems to be categorised here as “a website development tool”. I think most (big and small) companies have much higher expectations regarding a CMS system. Search capabilities, performance, easy to operate, flexible, tons of plugins supporting all media, etc. etc.

For the moment Drupal does the job most of the time, but it would be interesting to see reviews of some more advanced systems.

I’m really surprised CMSMS isn’t on this list. It’s one of the best I’ve used.

It’s interface is easy to use for beginners and developers, it’s powerful and templating is a snap. We host 40 odd sites with CMSMS and it’s presented very few problems.

I’ve experienced a ton of problems with silverstripe from a hosting management point of view (we only host a few as well) and usability and templating is a problem. Just setting up a simple form on Silverstripe is a challenge. I love the interface however it would be nice if they work on their plugin structure and templating.

I’ve looked a bunch of others and none really does what CMSMS does as well though some come close. Contao is promising and I was really disappointed with expressionengine. I expected much better from a paid product.

CMSMS could use a more active plugin development community and better user management.

WordPress is my second choice as CMS though it’s better as a publishing solution.

I’m actually partial to Ionisis’ take on content management systems. I’ve played around with it a bit as an alpha tester, and got to say I really like the idea of not having to deal with bugs and things that other systems may cause, among other things.

I use http://sitecake.com Drag and drop CMS without backend, without user manager, without database. You can edit images and text directly, on the webpage. It’s awesome how you can drag a video from another browser window or add a map by dragging it from Google Maps. Still in making, but already capable to make a client happy.

When we talking about content management ( not just simple site with several articles placed in categories ) than eZ Publish http://ez.no is one of the best solutions. It’s not trivial to develop sites using it, but it’s content model and datatypes just rocks.

At the minute I can build static websites using MS Expression Web – I’m not good with code.

I would like other people to be able to change some of the content of these websites – just text really with the occasional image or link in the text. There is no need for them to create new pages – just occasionally change the text. I suppose that this is CMS in a limited way.

Is there any software that I can use to do this – I don’t mind paying a little for it.

I’ve tried wordpress and looked into Joomla but I don’t like to use templates and I hate the faff of starting with a template and changing it – I find the result is never exactly what I want.